Grace
solution for Sin; 1 John 1:8-10
John
wrote this epistle to churches in Ephesus and the surrounding area of
Asia-Minor in order to teach them how to maintain their fellowship with God. They
were suffering a problem at that time in the early church with teachers who
were coming out of the churches, believers who have got caught up with the
ideas and concepts that were being taught that had their roots in the secular
philosophies of Platonism, neo-Platonism and some of the early ideas that later
came together as Gnosticism.
There
are two or three parts to the introduction. John lays the foundation for the
introduction in the first four verses and in the second section from 1:5 to 2:2
he is dealing with the problem of sin, how sin interrupts the believer’s
fellowship, and what the divine solution is. He starts off in verse 5 with the
character of God. If we are going to understand anything about fellowship, to
understand what it is to have an ongoing relationship with God as part of our
spiritual life, and if we are going to understand what happens when we sin,
then the starting point is the character of God. He pays down this principle
that “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” This is
specifically looking at His righteousness, His justice and His love. It is the
character of God that results in the illumination of man. The Word of God
reveals who God is and reveals His standards and His character to us, reveals
the fact that man is a sinner and has fallen short of the character of God and
that God has provided a perfect solution to man’s problem of having fallen
short of His character.
The
reason for emphasising that is because more often that not 99.9 per cent of the
time when we hear somebody exegete or teach 1st John 1 they will instantly
shift when they get to verses 6 and 7 where it talks about walking in the life
and teach that that is the believer walking consistent with God’s Word, and
they totally divorce that from the character of God. But it is the Word of God
that reveals the character of God. It is the Word of God that reveals who God
is, what His character is, and what His norms and standards are. So to walk
consistent with the Scripture is to walk consistent with God’s character. You
can’t separate the two. The other problem is that a lot pf people want to take
this as talking about salvation, and it is not; it is talking about walking in
the light of what God has revealed about Himself, His norms and standards, His
absolutes, and we have to walk consistent with His character or we cannot have
fellowship with Him. God cannot have fellowship with a creature that falls
short of His righteousness. We have to make a distinction between our eternal
relationship and our temporal fellowship.
The
Gnostic idea was that whatever was done in the body was sinful anyway so why
exercise any kind of moral restraint on physical activity. It was just pure
antinomianism, licentiousness. They could give vent to every lust pattern in
their sin nature and it wouldn’t matter because the material body has nothing
to do with the spiritual body. Part of this early Gnostic type of thinking was
that you could make this kind of dichotomy between the spiritual and the
physical. So John is going to express five different possibilities,
suppositions, called hypothetical conditions in the Greek, to express these
different statements that can be made. It can really be boiled down to two
basic scenarios. In verses 6 and 7 is the person who denies that sin affects
his relationship with God at all. There are many believers who teach that today
because, they say, as Christ died on the cross for our sins and our sins are
paid for it really doesn’t matter what you do. So verses 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 start with
an “if” clause: “If we say.”
Then
there is another category: those who deny sin. They are in self-deception and
they are into a form of perfectionism. This is expressed two different ways: in verse 8 and again in verse
10.
1
John 1:8 NASB “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving
ourselves and the truth is not in us.” In this verse we have the third person
plural, present active indicative of echo,
to have, to possess. With the negative it would be: “If I claim that I have no
sin”—no sin at all, it is in the singular, no individual sin. The
contrast here is between the person who claims to not have sin in v. 8 and the
person who admits sins [pl.] in verse 9. If the sin in v. 8 was just sin nature
then that is what v. 9 would have to relate to—just being a sinner,
having a sin nature. But verse 8 is expressing an extreme position of a person
who says he doesn’t have one single sin in my life. John says such a person is
in self-deception and is ignorant of doctrine.
But
in contrast to the person who says he doesn’t have a single sin in his life is
the believer who is advancing. This is parallel to the one who walks in the
light. 1 John 1:9 NASB “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and
righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
“If we confess” is a 3rd class condition, maybe we will and maybe we
won’t. If we don’t we stay out of fellowship, we continue to walk in darkness,
and continue to regress in our spiritual life. But the solution to
post-salvation sin is confession. Post-salvation sin breaks our fellowship with
God. Any sin violates the character of God. Fellowship is broken and the
ministry of God the Holy Spirit squelched. We have to recover the fellowship
with God and have the fellowship of the Holy Spirit restored so that we can
advance spiritually. So the solution is stated there: “If we confess our sins,”
plural.
The
word translated “confess” is the Greek word homologeo.
homo means the same; logeo is from the verb to say or to
speak. Someone will come along and say, well that means to say the same thing.
That is what is called an etymological fallacy. Word definition is determined
by word usage, and word usage of homologeo
doesn’t mean to say the same thing as, it means to confess or acknowledge, to
admit them, run them off in a list; identify them to God. He is not saying
confess the fact that you are a sinner, that you have a sin nature, but to list
them. It we admit or acknowledge our sins He is faithful. This is the apodosis,
the necessary result: “He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The first part of this emphasises His
character. He is always going to do the same thing every time we confess our
sins. This is related to His immutability and His righteousness. He cleanses us
“from all unrighteousness.” He cleanses us. The Greek word is katharizo and it indicates that he wipes
the slate clean and we are purified from all unrighteousness—not just the
sins we confess, but all of the ones we didn’t remember, the ones we didn’t
know were sins, the ones we didn’t confess—so that we are restored to
fellowship, we are walking by the Spirit, we are walking in the light
again.
1
John 1:10 NASB “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a
liar and His word is not in us.” There we have an intensive perfect verb
indicating I am not now in the present a sinner at all. The intensive perfect
indicates the results of a past action, and that past action would be the person
who claims that because he is saved the sin nature is somehow eradicated and he
no longer sins. So John says that if we say that we have not sinned we are
calling God a liar and His Word is not in us. In other words, there is no
doctrinal understanding of sin in us.
Then
he comes to chapter two and he is going to give us the basis of what happens in
heaven on the other side of confession. The confession is on our side but what
happens in the heavenly realm is related to the high priesthood of Jesus Christ
and His advocacy for us.